~a column by Colleen O’Brien
When I was in high school, I went through a period of interest in past lives. I don’t remember how the interest came to me because I grew up with a dad who was, despite his native Irish feyness, a no nonsense, proof is in the pudding kind of thinker. I suspect my interest was an offshoot of grade school slumber parties where we played the Ouiji board all night asking how many glasses were in the cupboard and who was the perfect boy for each of us beginning-to-be- interested girls.
The most interesting thing about past lives and the people who had experienced them was their stories of being princesses in ancient Egypt or lonely maidens rescued by knights in Medieval England. When it finally dawned on me that no one had ever been a slave in a past life, the whole idea palled. Really, not everyone could have been a princess in a past life, right? I never heard of one case of past life leprosy, so my conclusion was that past lives were tall tales.
So much for one more theory that wanes with time and maturity. But then, along came the Human Genome Project — I wrote a little about it a few weeks ago — and the first thing we learned from the 15 years of international study on the project was that we all have Africa in us. This is not surprising: the first human bones — of a female nicknamed “Lucy” — were discovered in Ethiopia in 1974, a hundred years or so after Darwin surmised that humans, homo sapiens (Lucy was a precursor, an Australopithecus), evolved in Africa. Soon studies followed the migration of these African humans around the globe. We have their DNA in us. Solid connections, if not exactly past life reality.
And now, as I pursue the fascination of where we really came from via the increasing knowledge pouring into the Human Genome Project, I discover that it’s a good bet many of us are progeny of Plantangenets, heroes of the wide-ranging reading of my junior high days, before I got hijacked by hormones into becoming a young woman and reading only Seventeen magazine..
Learning that the Plantagenet family is in me makes it very possible to pretend I was a princess in a past life. The Plantangenets were a family of power-hungry, warlike, backstabbing kings and queens in England and France during the High Middle Ages (1100s to 1500s). I loved ’em all, or at least how the authors wrote about them. To think that I am related to Eleanor of Aquitane, Henry II and am no doubt an immediate descendant of William the Conqueror fills me with a kind of embarrassing hubris. Oh, yeah, I was a princess in a past life. Or maybe that makes me a princess now? You probably are, too.
I’m back to believing in past lives.
Although, better yet, and long before the Project, we learned that we are all stardust. Every atom of us is composed of the same stuff as stars. My favorite “where did I come from?” answer? Stardust, of course. It beats any starry-eyed worship of Eleanor of Aquitane.
I may be out of Africa; I may be the result of a famous warrior queen and king getting it on; but to be stardust? Well, the magic of it . . . that we are all magic . . . should be fueling our days. This alone makes me smile, and then laugh, and then dance around like Tinker Bell. Stardust. Just imagine. We are not just the stuff of mere mortals; from the first human stargazers, we are the stuff of humankind’s imaginings: Apollos and Athenas, gods and goddesses, myth, dreams and hope; the very beginning of life and then of life everlasting.
It might be difficult to understand that Hitler and Trump are stardust, but surely there’s an ash heap of dark stars that defines their ilk? That some of the commentariat are comparing Trump to Hitler is gallows humor that is not funny. I don’t know what to make of bullies and stardust. We may be able to parse our physical make-up but oh that illusive mind part of us — where did it come from in its great hoping, thinking, plotting, loving, hating way?
Your own diverse human genome — from the intrepidly curious Africans wandering the world and investigating its mountains and valleys and rivers and oceans for millions of years down to the mere mortal royalty of Western Europe — believe in it; and believe in your pixie dust, your light within? your own claim to truth and beauty. We are made up of the ingredients — important stuff like carbon and nitrogen and oxygen — that are as old as the universe and as new as today. In a past life each of us was a star. Now we are stardust in human form. Past lives. Or past present and future lives, all on the same continuum, all of us the same.
Why we’re not lighting up the world instead of darkening it with war and ill will is more of a mystery than our past lives as stars.
